The Mast-Head: A Week on the Ice

Owing to the vagaries of weather here on the East End, few are the winters when we can reliably hope to haul the boats out of the barns and garages, sharpen our runners, and head for the ice. The winter of 2015 abruptly took a turn toward bitter with a Jan. 24 blizzard, and it has been cold enough to make for broad slabs of frozen water, but the snow accumulation made conditions on most ponds and lakes in the Northeast impossible for sailing.

So it was somewhat of a surprise that boats began appearing at the Flying Point Road bulkhead in Water Mill, a traditional loading-in place, during the last weeks of February. Between my drives to take one child or another to dance practice, I had been heading there to take a look. For too long, it seemed, a 30-foot-wide patch of open water flowed between us and sailing.

After a while, though, the ice on Mecox was passible; wind and snow over the preceding weeks had made for scattered rills, ridges, and bumpy places, but we could get to it. When the wind was slow, our family’s older boat, a batwing made by the Mead Glider Company some time before World War II, bogged down in the rough patches, giving a slight whiplash sensation as its speed dipped then rose again when it hit clearer ice.

Nostalgia may cloud my memory, but my recollection is that we had much better ice, and more of it, when I was a boy. The bat, as we called the boat, had been a gift from Dr. George Fish, a family friend, and, under my father’s guidance, we sailed all over the South Fork for what seemed to be weeks on end.

In those days, the Georgica Association was somewhat more relaxed than it is now, and we, along with iceboaters from all over Long Island, enjoyed perfect conditions sailing out from one of its coves. Another winter, Three Mile Harbor froze all the way from Hand’s Creek to the navigation channel, a vast expanse on which the class boats raced and we could tool around under Dr. Fish’s windows, though I believe he might have gone to meet his reward by then.

There were explorations elsewhere, too. Poxabogue Pond might be the first to freeze some winters. One time, the boat hit something and the boom came crashing down onto my best friend’s head out on Fresh Pond in Montauk. But now, for the most part, it’s all Mecox.

The batwing is a curious craft amid the high-tech DNs and Skeeters. One lies on one’s stomach to steer, feet pointed aft, in a basin-like plywood “basket.” There is room for a passenger, or two if they are children, so I can frequently have company.

On that final Sunday, just as the snow began, my friend Cheryl Bendini brought her daughters, Chiara and Ani, around for a ride. Ani had missed out the last time around, as she was just a few weeks old and bundled up in a sling under her mother’s coat. As we rumbled off onto the ice, Chiara, who was 3 the last time we sailed together and now is in middle school, said she could remember only the sensation of snow hitting her face.